NBA LIVE 2003 ARTICLES

June 14, 2007 - Seeing a beloved franchise crumble into a defunct mishmash of horrid ideas and misconstrued concepts seems to happen all too often in this day and age of money grabbing bottom-liners. A great game is relatively easy to create in comparison to what it takes to sustain that greatness throughout an entire series. Some franchises are great at keeping a high level of quality, whereas others take a swan dive into the shallow end of the pool. It might not be so bad when a company makes a one-hit-wonder that then flops, but when a series has been in our hearts for generations of systems and then takes an incredible downturn in quality, that's when we have to turn our hateful gaze to the publishers responsible.
We're usually not in the business of calling people out for shoddy development jobs, but in some cases, an exception must be made. In this article we'll detail some of our most beloved series that have taken a grave turn for the worse, and then tell you how future installments can right the ship. And yes, not even Electronic Arts will be spared this time around.

October 8, 2002 - This is NBA Live's debut on GameCube, but the 2002 edition on other platforms was choppy, devoid of any basketball artificial intelligence and had too much focus on the flashy, more superficial elements of professional basketball. With Sega's popular NBA 2K series making the jump to all three next generation consoles last season, NBA Live 2003 pretty much had to do something great to keep EA in the game. This latest version of NBA Live succeeds because it allows gamers to focus on the most exciting and entertaining parts of NBA basketball but with all of the rules and realism you'd expect from an all out NBA simulation. Plus the new "freestyle control" system on the C-stick could actually be the gaming revolution that EA's marketing types have been hyping up so much.

September 12, 2002 - Longtime fans of EA's NBA Live franchise may have reason to celebrate
this October as the 2003 edition could be the one to catapult the series
back into serious contention for best hoops game around. Live had fallen on
hard times recently, with the low point coming last fall in NBA Live 2002's
all-turbo, all-the-time style of wacky arcade gameplay. It just wasn't nearly as fluid as it should've been and barely
resembled an NBA licensed product. But a year later, major enhancements to
the control scheme, the AI and the player animation have combined to put
Live in a position to challenge Sega Sports' NBA 2K3 as the must have
hoops game.

August 23, 2002 - After several years on the slide, Electronic Arts is adding a strong dose of innovative game design NBA Live 2003 and it could be a revolution in
sports games that we've been waiting for. Since the controllers for the Xbox, PlayStation 2 and GameCube all feature dual analog control sticks, NBA Live 2003 is finally going to put the poor, underutilized right analog stick
to good use as the all purpose special move controller. Every crossover,
spin and shake move we've seen in every hoop game can now be controlled using move combinations on the right analog stick. But the real innovation runs much deeper than that.